Warnings! Spoilers ahead!

I'm of two minds about Nightmare's Disciple. There are a lot of bad strikes about the book: the characters are very stereotyped (in a novel that should be character-driven) except for the serial murder Marsh, there's too much exposition (the entire history of the Mythos in fairly obscure details), the book is not particularly scary and the plot, though it had potential, didn't work out very well.

      The serial murderer Marsh, on the other hand, I thought was a fascinating character—alternatively abused and spoiled rotten in childhood, arrogant yet actually self-loathing, and using his worship of the GOO as a cover for his own personal fantasies and neuroses. He is manipulator and manipulated both. I think this is what an worshipper of the GOO would actually resemble—pretending to himself and the world that the cruelty and evil is actually to free Cthulhu but it's all really an attempt to act out your own private fantasies (Yeah, Cthulhu really hates my next-door neighbor and the jocks at school!). Also, the sex-orgy rites are good for getting some fairly anti-social people some sex.

      I think Pulver made several serious mistakes: one, the Mythos is brought out way too early and way too obviously. That takes away a great deal of suspense and mystery.

      Two, the serial murderer Marsh is clearly alone or with a limited number of people who assist him with his crimes. One thing that Lovecraft, and for example, both Tierney in House of the Toad and Bloch in Strange Eons, always do is make sure to suggest that the Cthulhu Cult (or whatever you want to call it) has a vast (almost unlimited) number of worshippers and servants. In Nightmare's Disciple, that number of worshippers is six or seven (we're given names and biographies).

      Three, it's not until the very end that it's revealed that Marsh was, in fact, truly going to open the gateway for the Ugly Ones to reenter the world (ie, it wasn't just a fantasy in his head). If Pulver had shown us that Marsh had access to some supernaturalesque powers (which he obviously DOESN'T have in Nightmare's Disciple), then the novel would have been much scarier.

      The ending is really quite poor, too. It's basically the ending to a bad Holywood shoot-em-up. It seems like Pulver was going to try to do a lot more towards the end (he introduces a wild variety of Cthulhu worshippers just before the ending, some of whom seemingly exist just to get killed) but then decided to cut it off quick. The "project the Elder sign with your minds" finale was really weak—it's not the idea that bothers me, it's that it was so clumsily introduced. Frankly, I think what was published as Nightmare's Disciple is the first half of what Pulver had originally plotted out—with a lot more supernatural stuff and the wild Cthulhu-worshipping band being put to some significant use before the end. Unfortunately, I don't think too many people would have had the patience to sit through another 300+ pages. But then again, look at Lumley.

      In comparing this book to Tierney's House of the Toad or Niswander's Sand-Dwellers or Browning's Resume with Monsters or Lumley's Burrowers Beneath (which are similar in that they all (at least partially) set in recognizable, American/European urban/suburban settings with characters who have modern professions and impetuses), I would say that Pulver has not come up to the level of Tierney or Browning in terms of plotting, characterization, pure fear factor or enjoyability.

      That said, Pulver's depiction of Marsh was fascinating and the book wasn't bad—it just didn't really rise above the original conception of Red Dragon meets Mythos. I think if Pulver's hero had been more, well, anything (he's basically a cardboard cutout police pocedural hero) that would have made the novel a notch higher.

      I enjoyed the book, but the flaws are definitely there.

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